We stage our very own Digitiser indoor fireworks show, which starts and ends with a spectacularly explosive and hilarious fail that almost ends everything for Biffo and Gannon! Do not try this at home... like we did.

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GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

​One of the first games I can still clearly remember playing from when I was young wasn’t one of the all-time early arcade classics like Space Invaders or Donkey Kong.

It wasn’t even a clunky home version of these, like Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, even though I actually had an Atari 2600 and apparently also had the infamously duff 2600 port of Pac-Man as a photo exists of me playing it one Christmas (its shonky awfulness perhaps being the reason why I’ve blotted it out of my memory).
 
No, this was an obscure game on the 48k Speccy called Mutant Monty and the Temple of Doom, one of four games on an allegedly now rare (according to some dude on ebay trying to flog a copy) compilation tape called ‘ASSEMBLAGE’.

​Because, of course, nothing says ‘great new game’ like bundling it on a tape with 3 other unrelated efforts and then giving it an uninspiring collective title that basically means ‘pile of stuff’.

The name Mel Croucher will be familiar to anyone who grew up with home computers in the 1980s. He founded Automata UK - "the first games company in the UK" - off the back of a business which sold travel guides.

Automata went on to publish a series of idiosyncratic games for the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, including Pimania, My Name Is Uncle Groucho You Win A Fat Cigar, and his multimedia opus, Deus Ex Machina. Unfortunately, tastes change, and as gaming became more corporate and risk-averse, so Croucher's particular blend of surreal whimsy fell out of fashion. 

However, it is one particular Croucher production that we turn our attention to today; the rarely remembered anthology Can of Worms, a collection of mini games for the 1K ZX81, which saw the Sunday Times accuse Croucher of "peddling pornorgraphy to kids".

Croucher, to his credit, saw this as "great publicity".

​Here's a rundown of all of the games featured on Can of Worms; a satirical halfway stop between puerile juvenilia and artistic genius, that in many ways is as relevant today as it was back in 1981.

Do you ever ask yourself that age-old question: Which super-power would you most want to have?

Flight would be cool, but I admit that I'd worry about getting cold up there. Also, if I could fly everywhere, why would I bother walking? Does flying burn off calories? Nobody wants to look up in the sky and see a big fat man with a feeble pair of atrophied legs dangling below him.

What about invisibility? The only legitimate use I can think of for it is spying on people, and becoming a pervert. Firstly, I don't want to know what people are saying about me. There's a reason why I don't ego-surf. These days. Also, it would depend on whether my clothes became invisible too. Would I have to walk around in the nuddy? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. Also, what if I got cold?

Being able to breath underwater like Aquaman? It's alright if you live at the seaside, I guess, but the main thing that puts me off going swimming is all the faff of having to get dry and changed afterwards. Plus, it's probably really cold at the bottom of the ocean, and it's not like you can go swimming in a thick woolly jumper.

Actually... now that I think about it, it seems my choice of superpower would be dependent on whether it made me feel cold or not. 

Gannon and Larry Bundy Jr review Tomy's Atomic Pinball game, then Gannon challenges Rhett and Link from Good Mythical Morning to an actual fight! Warning: contains Gannon Brand (tm) filth!

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Back when I used to babysit my nieces, I'd get them to behave by telling them that Hitler lived in the living room light. I would threaten to turn on the light, which would make "Hitler" and "The Bird" fly out and "get them".

Now in their 30s, they still remind me of the trauma this day.

Adolf Hitler, to my generation, was the original boogeyman. When I was growing up, he was a figure of fun - the awful power he wielded awfully was something that, to my parents' generation, who had lived through the war, could only be undermined by making fun of it. It was, as much as anything, a coping mechanism. It diminished his power.

​Remember the comedian Freddie Starr? He had a whole routine where he'd dress up as Hitler and goose-step around the stage. This was something that could be seen on primetime TV, pre-watershed. Could you imagine, say, the outrage if Michael McIntyre presented the 2019 Royal Variety Show dressed in an SS uniform? Or if some tatty, low-rent, video game blog wrote an article in which Hitler was portrayed as an idiot? 

That's how we used to see Nazis, you see; idiots, who happened to do something unspeakably evil. Those few who still clung to the ideology were diminished by our license to take the piss out of them. Now we're all much more fearful that Nazis aren't quite as mired in the past as they once were. 

Of course, Germany has had a very different attitude to all things Nazi, and with good reason. Until last year, any image associated with Nazism - such as the swastika - was banned. Since the German ratings board, the USK, relaxed its rules, Nazi and other extremist imagery is now allowed in a video games, which are finally classed as an artistic product.

​Before the change though, games featuring swastikas were either banned outright, or had to be altered for the German market. Here are some of the more notable examples. 

Octav1us and Gannon take a spin of some rare gaming vinyl albums, featuring Pac-Man and Conker's Bad Fur Day - with constant interjections from Larry Bundy Jr!

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I'm lucky. Our YouTube channel, on the whole, has never really been the target of any especially nasty comments. We get the occasional one, of course - it's the Internet - and I've deleted the odd comment or two that seemed particularly mean-spirited towards somebody on the channel (never myself, so you know).

I mean, fine if you want to see that as censorship, but I figure I have the right to protect people I care about. If you came into my house and threw handfuls of gravel at my cats, I'd ask you to leave, probably. On the whole, however, it happens a lot less than I was expecting. 

We're a pretty small channel of course. I don't think we're particularly controversial. Plus, we're all SO lovely that how could you possibly have an issue with us?! The only time we ever got a lot of negative attention was when Digitiser The Show first went out. Part of that, I believe, was down to expectation versus what they got. 

We had a lot of people who were new to the whole Digi thing. Plus there was an element of Digitiser The Show that was trying to appeal to two different audiences; the die-hards who were there for Found Footage and classic Digi... and those who wanted a proper, serious, gaming show. And some of those people, because the Kickstarter drew in those who weren't necessarily Digi fans, were backers. They weren't best pleased by the presence of Beautiful Boys and Chart Cats.

Still, I felt the pressure to appeal to everyone, rather than the core audience I prefer to make stuff for. Clearly I no longer care about that when it comes to the Digi Minis. Consequently, they're much more glorious and purely "me" as a result. Suffice to say, even if it means we end up raising less money for projects, that's the starting point next time.

However, that's all preamble. What I want too talk about is Ooblets. 

​Sorry... what?

Yes: Ooblets!

Ooblets...

Politics. It's a minefield. One thing I'd hope all of you reading this will agree upon is that video games are not to blame for the mass shootings in the US over the weekend.

Inevitably, that hasn't stopped Donald Trump promising to end the "glorification of violence" offered by "gruesome and grisly video games".

"It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence," uttered the gruesome and grisly president, who quite probably has never played a video game in his life, and has no evidence whatsoever suggesting that shooter Patrick Cruisius was inspired by games, violent or otherwise. 

"We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately," Trump huffed, in the hollow, meaningless, way that he does. 

It's not the first time he's used this decades-old scapegoat to shirk responsibility for his own rhetoric, views and support for the NRA.

Following the 2018 Florida school shooting in which 17 died, Trump rambled: "We have to do something about maybe what they are seeing and how they are seeing it. I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts."

The irony, of course, is that while video games themselves may not be to blame for mass shootings perpetrated by young, disenfranchised, white men... it was gamer culture which helped Trump get elected to a platform in which he could galvanise and stir up the white supremacy which led directly to many of these shootings. 

And that's a fact. More and more people are saying that Donald Trump really shaped young people's thoughts.

Octav1us, Gannon, Larry and Biffo reveal the scariest games they've ever played, debate how James Dean died, and tackle the thorny issue of triple-A games!

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Do you know what doesn't get spoken about enough these days? The fact that Hugo Boss was a member of the Nazi Party.

Hugo Boss - the company founded by Hugo Boss, the man - provided uniforms for the Nazis, including those iconic SS uniforms, and the outfits worn by the Hitler Youth. These were often manufactured by forced labourers, the majority of whom were women. 

Admittedly, the company did eventually express its "profound regret" at all this, but not until 2011, following legal proceedings brought about by Holocaust survivors. 

Anyway. Think about that the next time you're spritzing your gooch with Hugo Boss perfume, or you see an ad with Chris Hemsworth or Gerard Butler looking all sultry in a suit. Hugo Boss was a Nazi. Not one of these "Ha ha - you called me a Nazi, therefore you lose the argument! I invoke Godwin's Law!" Nazis you get nowadays... but an actual Nazi who was happy being called a Nazi.

Because he was a Nazi, and his company designed those funny trousers Nazis wore, with the big pouches in the thighs, which they presumably used for storing knockwurst.

And while we're at it, Volkswagen was created by the Nazi Party under direct instruction from Adolf Hitler himself, IBM provided early computers to help the Nazis with the logistical demands of genocide, and Coca-Cola aggressively promoted itself as a pro-Nazi drink in Germany - with Fanta being created to appeal specifically to Nazi supporters. The original recipe was described as using "the leftovers of leftovers", due to limited availability of ingredients during the war.

That sounds like some weird joke, but it isn't. Fanta is a drink for Nazis. Fact.